Louisiana’s update of its coastal restoration and hurricane protection master plan needs to address the concerns of Native Americans that their communities will be sacrificed in the name of “trade-off,” several representatives of the United Houma Nation told state officials Wednesday night. Native Americans in Pointe au Chien, Dulac, Montegut and other coastal communities fear their communities will be sacrificed in the name of “trade-off” as the state updates its master plan for coastal protection and restoration, representatives of the United Houma Nation told state officials Wednesday night.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-Picayune archiveNative Americans in Pointe au Chien, Dulac, Montegut and other coastal communities fear their communities will be sacrificed in the name of 'trade-off' as the state updates its master plan for coastal protection and restoration. This dead cypress grove near Montegut was photographed in July 2008.

“No community, at any cost, should be traded off,” Pointe au Chien resident Chris Chaisson said during a state-sponsored meeting at City Park to gather public comments on the master plan rewrite.

The small United Houma Nation village was excluded from the Morganza-to-the-Gulf levee system now being built to protect the Houma area.

“There’s no reason why any taxpaying system should be marked off as a trade-off community, especially considering the culture and heritage associated with it,” he said.

“If you use the word 'trade-off,' you’re committing environmental and cultural injustice,” said Maryal Mewherter, parliamentarian for the Houma Nation tribal council, which represents Native American residents in six coastal parishes.

She invited state officials to visit several of the communities to discuss the master plan, and urged rebuilding barrier islands south of several of those communities be one of the first projects to be completed under the revision.

The revised plan will give more weight to such cultural concerns and will give less weight to the financial cost of building levees and coastal restoration projects in decisionmaking, said Kirk Rhinehart, chief of the planning division of the Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration.

But the master plan will require hard choices, as wetland loss and sea level rise outstrip the financial abilities of the state to protect both the natural resources and economic investment along the coast, state officials said.

Rhinehart used oyster leases as an example: present leaseholders may see their oysters killed by future freshwater diversions, but the plan will look for new locations for leases.

The combined cost of rebuilding wetlands and improving levees and other structures to hold back hurricane storm surges is likely to reach at least $500 million to $1 billion a year for the next 50 years, said Natalie Peyronnin, a planner with the office.

State officials think they will have at least $20 billion to $50 billion over the next 50 years to pay for the projects. There’s already about $80 million a year available from the federal-state Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act program, which builds smaller coastal restoration projects. The state is expected to get about $110 million a year from offshore oil revenue beginning in 2017, under the federal Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, and the state also hopes that Congress will begin appropriating as much as $150 million a year to build projects under the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Program.

That doesn’t include money the state may receive from fines levied against BP or other responsible parties stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or payments required of the responsible parties to mitigate damage caused by the spill.

The original master plan, approved by the Legislature in 2007, contained a variety of broad project ideas. At the time, projects were being chosen that were measured in terms of the dollars spent per acres improved or area protected.

Annual plans in ensuing years contained an updated list of levee and restoration projects the state had committed to build, including those proposed under a variety of federal programs and those that would be built with state money

The revised plan will instead focus on broad goals: protect rural areas from the effects of a 50-year storm surge, smaller communities from 100-year surges and large cities, like New Orleans, from larger storm surges.

It also will aim at protecting the cultural and natural resources in broader terms.

But the final product will include specific recommendations for families of restoration and levee projects all along the state’s coastline, their costs and schedules for the construction.

The rewrite will be made public in early January, and state officials will return to New Orleans for a more formal public hearing on its contents on Jan. 23. Hearings also will be held at other locations across the state.

After revisions based on those hearings and on meetings with groups representing key stakeholders, including officials in the fishery, shipping, energy and agriculture industries, as well as local public officials, a final version of the master plan will be presented to the Legislature for its approval in late March.